Dating services are of ever growing demand. An increasing number of individuals each desire to meet a potential partner who matches his/her interests and personal preferences. Prior art conventional Internet dating services enable a person to create a personal profile including the person's characteristics, hobbies and preferences. The conventional dating service runs a query in a database of profiles, i.e., “profile catalog”, to produce a list of matching profiles based on the personal profile. Once a match has been determined, both sides can communicate for instance by telephone or over a data network e.g. the Internet until they decide to meet for a date. A representative example of a prior art dating service is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,061,681 entitled “On-Line Dating Service for Locating and Matching People Based on User Selected Search Criteria”.
Conventional dating services suffer from many disadvantages. Often the preliminary communications are time consuming, costly, exasperating and postpone a first frontal meeting which determines the nature of any future relationship between the individuals. Another drawback of conventional dating services is related to privacy. The method used in conventional Internet dating services is based on a search through a “catalog” of personal profiles of registered members. Each member can search and view profiles of many other registered members. This poses a privacy problem since a registered member cannot control specifically and in advance to whom he/she wishes to expose his/her personal profile. Another drawback is that prior art dating services are prone to fraudulence e.g. personal misrepresentation or otherwise inaccurate disclosure of information causing disappointment on the part of one or both individuals upon meeting for the first time.
Furthermore, prior art dating services administer uniformity of style between the profiles of the members by requiring each member to complete a standard personal information form. Uniformity of the personal information is required to enable querying the database of member profiles based on previously determined criteria. Hence, a member of a prior art dating service is not provided with the opportunity to present and express himself/herself in a unique and individual way.
A prior art dating service can generate revenue only after the dating service has acquired a sufficiently large customer base. Having a large customer base is essential for initiating and perpetuating the operation of the prior art dating service.
Koester, U.S. Pat. No. 6,594,502, entitled “Dating System” disclosed a dating system in which a potential date notices a registered member of the dating system driving his/her automobile and the potential date contacts the dating service based on an identifier such as the license plate of the automobile. The disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 6,594,502 suffers from several disadvantages. First, searching for a date is most safely performed not while operating a motor vehicle. Furthermore, the concept of U.S. Pat. No. 6,594,502 is appropriate for drivers only and only when a single driver operates the automobile. Otherwise, the potential date will be inquiring about the wrong person.
There is thus a need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have a system and method for providing dating services in a way that overcomes disadvantages of conventional dating services, the method based on receiving a ‘dating card’ which directs a recipient of the dating card to a secure network resource providing personal information about the dating card owner.